1 Cover photograph: Ilpo Koskinen Copenhagen 2002 2 Introduction: the Experience Society This paper introduces the notion of “semiotic neighborhood,” elaborates it with international examples, and illustrates the rise of one such neighborhood, South Helsinki. It specifies the recently popular experience economy idea by showing that such economy has roots in local urban communities. One of the classics of modern sociology, Georg Simmel, once noted that a product has a personality insofar as we can project our self to the product. It is unified, and we can relate it to it on a personal basis. His list of unified products includes art works that “requires only one person, but requires him totally, right down to his innermost core,” philosophical works, and crafts products (or custom work), which bear the mark of a craftsman, and is usually specifically tailored to the consumer (Simmel 1990: 455-457). In contrast to these personal products, there are industrial products that are a result of a complex division of labor. These products “lack the spiritual determinacy that can be easily perceived in a product of labor that is wholly the work of a single person” (Simmel 1990: 454). The product is an achievement, not of one person, but of several persons. This is “objective culture,” typical to modern consumer culture in which consumption is constantly determined by such impersonal products. Furthermore, if produced in large quantities, products have to be so designed that they are “acceptable and enjoyable to a very large number of individuals,” and therefore “cannot be designed for subjective differentiation of taste” (Simmel 1990: 455). Markets have certainly understood the need for more personalized products. The following example gives an idea of how these “personalizations” can be translated into economic values. Take the example of a design icon, Juicy Salif lemon squeezer, designed for Alessi by Philippe Starck. Juicy Salif sold for 40• in Helsinki in summer 2000. The fact that it is practically usable makes it easy to see as an object of art. If displayed in a museum, it becomes just an object of reflection. In ordinary contexts, it is available for use, though. An analysis of this object can focus on the - Product (shapes, forms, and contours, colors, looks, kinetic qualities, and touch). - The designer (other products, history, artistic aims, training). - The company (products, trends in those products; meaning of the product in company history and philosophy) - The art world (design movements as a context, museums, exhibitions, awards). Depending on the product, and the qualities of the customer, these objects lots of possibilities for those reflexive consumers who seek to semiotize their world, and build their identities through design objects, fashion, and art. There is literature to assist in such work. There are several well-illustrated books on both Alessi and Philippe Starck, and they are easily within reach. Changes in production have gone along with this change. Increasingly, consumers are sold not only products, but also services and stories with them. Products themselves are more complex than before: it is not possible to design with one color only, as Henry Ford once did. Consumer products borrow their forms from cars, shorts shoes, jewelry, and other sources. These trends have been reflected in sociological Zeitgeist diagnostics in various ways. Postmodernists have followed Baudrillard, who likened postmodern consumption to quiz shows. In these shows, people respond to questions without context, and go on. The next question has no relationship to the previous one: what is being construed is a repetitive and serial world, which has no respect for complex arguments, structures, and grand narratives. Key to postmodernity is a sense of ecstasy in front of a series of images and meanings. Meanings float. The boundary to real vanishes; reality is absorbed in the hyperreal (Baudrillard 1998: esp. 74). In contrast to Baudrillard, some commentators of the present condition claim that people relate reflectively to meanings and aesthetics (Lash 1999). For these commentators, signs do not seduce 3 people as if this process would be unconscious. Instead, they communicate their identities for each other through their lifestyle (Featherstone 1991: 86). Among the traditional societies of Europe, exemplary patterns of consumption were set by the upper classes, which were followed by the middle stratum (Bourdieu 1986). In the New World, the process centres more clearly around money (Lamont 1992). Some commentators maintain that we live in experience economy: experience-producing industries have grown faster than other sectors of economy since early 1960s (Pine and Gilmour 1999). Empirically, this new consumption scene goes back to large cities, and to their new high earning middle classes (Sassen 1991). A recent estimate put the number of these people, prime consumers of sophistication and spiritual meanings in goods and services, to 50 million worldwide (Ray and Anderson 2000). Purchases of these new middle classes have prompted several new forms of consumption such as large-scale shopping malls, megastores, and flagship stores. The cathedrals of consumption typified by the Las Vegas casino scene (Ritzer 1999) illustrate the extremes of such world which, however, describes ordinary consumption much worse (see Savage et al. 1995; Ilmonen 1996). This new site for consumption also consists of what are called “semiotic neighborhoods” in this paper. Semiotic Neighborhoods Semiotic consumption can be classified into three types according to its exclusiveness. In the mass- market end, there are traditional department stores and their 20th century equivalents, malls. Typically catering to the middle-classes, these stores offer a wide range of goods and services, some of higher quality than others, but overall, their business is geared towards the masses of middle-income customer (see McCracken 1988; Sennett 1978; Miller, M. 1981). This part of the distribution chain of signs is oriented to types who spend their time in downtown rather than stay – like less mobile traditional working classes – in what the sociologist Sharon Zukin calls “neighborhood shopping streets” (Zukin 1999: 189-192). Typically, large downtown stores offer a wide selection of goods and services, ranging from perfumes and cosmetics to electronics and books. However, their identity is based on the store rather than on, say, people who have designed or manufactured these goods. In stark contrast to this mass-oriented semiotization, a more exclusive layer of goods is available for the rich, for institutions, and for connoisseurs with deep pockets. As Lewis Mumford once noted in his The Culture of Cities (p. 214), hand crafted quality goods with extraordinary price are available for the traditional upper class in the world’s most serene city center neighborhoods. Mayfair has New Bond Street, Opéra Quarter has Rue de la Paix, and Upper East Side has Madison Avenue. These are places for the rich and famous and for traditional aristocracy. Exclusively upper class, these streets and neighborhoods are far beyond the reach of ordinary consumers, except for window-shopping. Some of these streets have existed for centuries. Their roots typically lie in royal courts and aristocratic consumption in Europe, and in their capitalist equivalents in North America. A third, more recent development has to be added to the picture: designer streets and quarters. These streets are a recent addition to the exclusive end, but they have come to epitomize “chic” today for most people. At the far end of the development, there are a few ultimate designer streets: Avenue Montaigne and Rue du Faubourg St Honoré in Paris, the quadrilatero in Milan (the fashion district), London’s Sloane Street, and New York’s Fifth Avenue. It is in these streets in which most luxury goods companies have their flagship stores. Smaller but still extreme displays of luxury outside these flagship shop areas exist in all big cities: Los Angeles has Rodeo Drive, Chicago Oak Street, Berlin Kürfurstendamm and Fasanenstrasse. Smaller cities have developed their own, local version of these luxury streets, as the examples of Söder in Stockholm, South Helsinki, and Ströget in Copenhagen show. Mostly focusing on fashion clothing (for men, high-quality ready-to-wear), accessories and jewelry, shops in these streets offer a vast selection on a price range from $5 key rings to $25.000 jackets to $100.000 watches and upwards. These are “semiotic neighborhoods” proper. 4 Picture 1.Ultimate luxury: LouisVuitton at Avenue des Champs Elysées (IK 2002) What people buy from these neighborhoods are signs, distinction, and sophisticated cultural experiences rather than merely useful things. Cultural business has grown vastly (see Zukin 1999) up to a point in which even some of the greatest of cities are characterized less by manufacturing and even service economy than cultural production. In addition to arts and history, these semiotic neighborhoods have become tourist traps as well: tourist guides focus on them. Thus, culture has many functions in these cities: culture attracts tourism, educated inhabitants, and worldly business people. It also has significant indirect economic benefits for services such as restaurants, museums, and coffee shops (Zukin 1999). These designer streets have become important elements of city landscapes fairly recently, that is, from the mid-1970s (Sassen 1991: 335-336). Also, their tendency to concentrate in certain neighborhoods is a fairly recent phenomenon. Success calls for more success; in the end, several shops flock in the same area, pushing other business out. A diversified mixture of uses at some place in the city becomes outstandingly popular and successful as a whole. Because of the location’’ success, which is invariably based on flourishing and magnetic diversity, ardent competition for space in which locality develops. It is taken up in what amounts to the economic equivalent of a fad. The winners in the competition for space will represent only a narrow segment of the many uses that together created success.